File Unretrievable from Floppy

A week ago I cleaned a couple of Excel 97 files off my hard drive, onto a 3 1/2 in floppy which already contained various files. The copied files came from my hard drive's My Briefcase folder. I used the procedure, in the My Computer view right-click and drag the file to the A: drive icon, then select copy (or was it move??) from the resulting shortcut menu.

Now, I cannot open either Excel file ( one is 65K, the other is 235K ). The floppy drive grinds a good long time, then produces a message box saying,
Error Copying File...
Cannot copy [name of file, without an extension]: Error performing inpage operation.

I am now trying to rebuild the My Briefcase folder (which I subsequently emptied of all files...). My hope is that My Briefcase does something special to files saved there, and the files moved/copied from there have to move back into My Briefcase in order to work once more.

Does anyone have any insights what to do, or where I should search for help?

Re: File Unretrievable from Floppy

John, as much as I hate to say it - I think it's irretrievable. An inpage operation is transfer of disk-stored data into memory, so this indicates that the disk is likely bad. I don't believe Briefcase does anything beyond synchronization of data but I may be wrong. You may be able to run scandisk on the floppy and retrieve the data - but again, I think the disk is probably bad. You may want to try it in a different machine to see if it's a problem with the floppy drive in your system.